Manifold: Origin

by Stephen Baxter

  "Why is this important?"

  "I don't know yet. But it does appear odd that such a profound contradiction is to be found in both universes..."

  Light flickered, startlingly blue, beyond the door frame. Malenfant gasped. The color had tugged at his heart – for it was the color of the flash from within the Wheel that had consumed Emma.

  They hurried outside. There was something in the sky.

  Manekatopokanemahedo

  In her first stunned glance Manekato made out a single vast continent, scorched red, and a blue-gray ocean from which the sun cast a single blunt highlight. The disc, almost full, was surrounded by a thin layer of blurred softness. An atmosphere, then. But no lights shone in the darkened, shadowed crescent.

  The Wind buffeted Manekato, turbulent, suddenly uneven. Already it begins, she thought.

  Small Workers, no larger than insects, hovered around Babo's head, defying the shifting breeze; she saw their light play over his face, dense with information. "Its gross parameters are as we anticipated," he said. "A Moon, a world, two thirds of Earth's diameter, a quarter of its mass. It has an atmosphere –"

  "It is not Farmed," Without-Name hissed. "Your jabber of numbers is meaningless, you fool. Look at it: it is not Farmed. This Moon is primordial."

  Without-Name was right. Even without magnification Manekato could see great expanses where nothing lived: that ugly red scar of a continent, the naked oceans, those crude caps of ice. It was a world of waste, of unawakened resources.

  Wild.

  "Wild, yes," growled Without-Name. "Consider the comparison with our Earth. For two million years we have cherished every atom. We have carefully sustained the diversity of species. We have even sacrificed ourselves – billions of years of lost lives – refusing longevity in order to maintain the balance of the world."

  Mane murmured, "An ecology consisting of a single species would not be sustainable."

  Without-Name laughed. "You quote childish slogans. Think, Manekato! Our species has been shaped, even as we have shaped our world. But nothing about that ugly Moon has been managed. We will have no place. We will have to fight to achieve our purposes, perhaps even to survive."

  Mane was troubled by that perception, though she acknowledged it might contain a grain of truth.

  "But," Babo said, an edge in his voice, "the Red Moon cannot be primordial – it must contain mind – for it would not be here otherwise."

  Yes, Mane thought. Yes. And for that she was afraid of this monstrous Moon. It was a deep fear, of a type she had never suffered before, a fear suffused by a sense of powerlessness. She had to search deep into the recesses of her memory, poring through the most ancient roots of the million-year-old language with which all children were born, to find an ancient, obsolete word that suited what she felt: Superstition.

  Babo rattled more statistics of the Moon's composition, describing a ball of silicate rock and a small iron core. But as his courage grew his thinking seemed to clear. "Earth," he said. "That wandering Moon is made of the same material as Earth's outer layers. How can that be?"

  The three of them began to talk rapidly, their minds developing and sharing hypotheses.

  "Given the identity of substances this body cannot have formed elsewhere in the Solar System."

  "Could it have budded off an Earth while the planet was accreting from the primordial cloud of dust and ice?"

  "No, for then its proportions should resemble Earth's global composition, and this body shows a deficiency of iron and other heavy elements. It is more like a piece of the Earth's mantle, its outer layers, ripped up and wadded together and thrown into the sky."

  "Then an Earth must have formed, differentiated so the iron-rich rocks sank to the core, before the material to assemble this Moon was detached from the outer layers. But how would it happen?"

  "A vast volcanic event? But surely that would not be sufficiently violent –"

  "A collision. A rogue planetesimal, a giant, or even a planet. Such a collision might cause a splash of ejecta which could accrete into this Moon..."

  Within seconds, then, they had unraveled the mystery of the Moon's origin, a deduction that had taken humans two centuries of geological science.

  All around the Earth, other witnesses must be coming to a similar conclusion, and Manekato imagined a growing consensus of understanding whispering in Babo's ear.

  "But," Manekato said, "if this Red Moon was born from Earth, it was not our Earth."

  "No," Babo said somberly. "For our Earth never suffered a catastrophic collision of that magnitude. We would see the results today, for example in the composition of the planet's core. And if our world had enjoyed the company of such a Moon everything would have been different in its evolution: much of the primordial atmosphere would have been stripped off in the collision, leaving thinner air less rich in carbon dioxide; there would have been many subtle effects on tides and the world's spin..."

  "On such a world," Manekato said, "one would not need a Mapping to see the stars. And in such a sky a Moon like this would ride. But such is not our world."

  "Not our universe," said Without-Name bluntly. "Tell me then, Babo: what do your Astrologers have to say of a power which can Map a Moon, not merely from planet to planet, but between universes?"

  "They have little to say," he said evenly. "That is why we must go there... There is something more." He uttered a soft command to his Workers.

  A new Mapping was made, showing them a vision from a large Farm that straddled the equator of the planet.

  A giant blue circle, hovering above the ground, was sweeping over the Farm's cultivated ground, upright and improbably tall. People stood and watched as it passed. Workers backed away before it. Children ran alongside it, laughing, levering themselves forward on their knuckles in their excitement.

  And there were people falling out of the circle's empty disc.

  No, not people, Manekato saw: like people, naked hominids, some tall and hairless, some short and squat and covered in fine black hair. They flopped and gasped for breath like stranded fish, and their flimsy bodies were buffeted this way and that by the Wind.

  "What does it mean, Babo?"

  "One can predict the broad outline of events. But chaos is in the detail..." He waved his hand, banishing the image.

  A gust of Wind howled across the bare, eroded plateau, powerful enough to make Manekato stagger.

  Babo stepped forward. "It is time."

  Manekato and Without-Name took his hands and each other's so the three of them were locked together in a ring.

  At the last moment Manekato asked, "Must it be so?"

  Babo shrugged regretfully. "The predictions are exact, Mane. The focusing effect of the shoreline's shape here, the gradient of the ocean floor, the precise positioning of the new Moon in the sky: all of these have conspired to doom our Farm, and the Poka line with it."

  Without-Name tipped back her head and laughed, the spikes that covered her body bristling and twisting. "And for all our vaunted power we can do nothing about it. This is a moment that separates past from future. It is a little death. My friends, welcome the cleansing!"

  Manekato uttered a soft command.

  The three of them rose into the air, through a body's height. The Mapping had begun.

  Mane...

  Surprised to hear her name called, Manekato looked down. One of the Workers, a battered old gadget from a long-forgotten crop, was peering up at her with a glinting lens. It was clinging to the ground with long stabilizing suckers, but the Wind battered at it, and its purple-black hide glistened with rain.

  Memory stirred. There had been a Worker like this when she had clambered from her mother's womb, chattering excitedly, full of energy and curiosity. In those first days and weeks that Worker had fed her, instructed her, kept her from harm, and comforted her when she was afraid. She had not seen the old gadget for years, and had thought little of it. Could this be the same Worker? Why should it seek her now, as it was about t
o be destroyed?

  A wall of rain swept over the mountain-top. The three of them were immediately soaked, and Manekato labored to breathe the harshly gusting air.

  When the rain gust passed, the mountain-top had been swept bare; all the Workers were gone, surely destroyed. Manekato felt an odd, distracting pang – regret, perhaps?

  But this was no time to dwell on the past; the nameless one was right about that.

  The three of them ascended without effort.

  She was still clothed in her body, her legs dangling, her hair soaked. But of course this body was a mere symmorph: differing from her original self in form, but representing the same idea. (And in fact, as she had been through hundreds of previous Mappings, that "original" body had itself been nothing but a symmorph, a copy of a copy reworked to suit temporary needs, though one tailored to remain as close to her primary biological form as possible.)

  But such a morphology was no longer appropriate. With a soundless word, she discarded the symmorph, and accepted another form.

  Now she was smeared around Earth, immersing it in her awareness, as if it were a speck that floated in her eyeball.

  The great Farms glittered over the planet: from pole to pole, around the equator, even on the floor and surface of the oceans, and in the clouds. It was as if the planet were encrusted with jewels of light and life and order. There were no barren red deserts, no frozen ice caps here.

  But already, as the Red Moon began its subtle gravitational work, the first changes were visible. Huge ocean storms were unraveling the delicate ocean floor and water-borne Farms. A vast line of earthquakes and ugly volcanism was unstitching an eastern continent. And, from an ocean which was sloshing like water in a disturbed bath, a train of immense tsunamis marched towards the land.

  Soon the Poka Farm was covered – extinguished, scoured clear, even the bedrock shattered, the bone dust of her ancestors scattered and lost, beyond memory.

  The jewel-like lights were failing, all over the world. There was nothing for her here.

  She gazed at her destination, the new, wandering Moon.

  Reid Malenfant

  Malenfant's world was stratified into layers of varying incomprehensibility.

  At the base of it all was the stockade, the familiar sturdy fence and the huts of mud and wood: the physical infrastructure of the world, solid, imperturbable.

  And then there were the people.

  Hugh McCann was standing alone at the center of the colony's little street, hands dangling at his sides, gazing up at a corner of the sky. His mouth was open, and his cheeks glistening, as if he was weeping. Nemoto was shielding her eyes, so that she couldn't so much as glimpse the sky above.

  He saw Julia and Thomas, close together near the gate. The Hams didn't seem disturbed by the fiery sky. They were stripping off their neat, sewn-together garments, revealing bodies that were ungainly slabs of corded muscle. They pulled on much cruder skin wraps, of the kind Malenfant had seen Thomas wear out in the bush, tying them up with thongs. More Hams were coming in through the open gate (the gate is open, Malenfant!), and they picked up the discarded English-type clothing and started to pull it on.

  A shift change, he thought, wondering. As if the settlement was a factory maintained by a pool of labor beyond the stockade walls.

  And in the sky...

  You can't put off thinking about it any longer, Malenfant.

  Start with the basics. There is the white sun, the yellow Earth (yellow?). There are the clouds, stringy cirrus today, littered over the sky's dome. And beyond the clouds, in the spaces between sun and Earth –

  What, Malenfant?

  He saw bars, circles, lines, patterns that seemed to congeal and then disappear. If he stared fixedly at one point of the sky he would make out a fragment of texture, as if something was sliding by, something huge, beyond the roof of the world. But it never stayed stable in his vision – like an optical illusion, a form that oscillated between two interpretations, a bubble that flipped into a crater. And no matter how he tried he would find his eyes sliding away to the familiar, to the huts, the red dust of the ground.

  "Why can't I see it?"

  Nemoto kept her head down. "It's too far beyond your experience, Malenfant. Or above it. You think of your eyes as little cameras, your ears as microphones, giving you some objective impression of the true world. They are not. Everything you think you see is a kind of virtual-reality projection, based on sensory input, framed by prejudice about what the brain imagines ought to be out there. Remember, we evolved as plain-dwelling hunter-gatherers, and our sensoriums are conditioned to the hundred-mile scale of Earth landscapes. Malenfant, you just aren't programmed to see –"

  "The scaffolding in the sky."

  "Whatever it is."

  "Like the Hams. When we went to the wreck of the Redoubtable. It was as if they couldn't see it at all."

  "Do you find the thought disturbing, Malenfant? To find you have the same limitations as Neandertals?"

  "What's happening, Nemoto? What is coming down on us?"

  "I could not begin even to guess."

  McCann was standing alone, still weeping.

  As Malenfant approached, McCann used his sleeve to wipe away the dampness on his cheeks, the dribble of mucus that had dangled from his nose. "Malenfant. You bear yourself well. The first Change I witnessed threw me into a cold grue of terror. But you have a stiff back; I could see that about you from the start."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Can't you see?" And he stabbed a finger at the sky, at the Earth.

  The new Earth.

  The planet was a ball of yellow-white cloud, very bright. It was banded by water-color streaks of varying colors. There were dark knots in the bands, perhaps giant storms. It reminded Malenfant of nothing so much as spaceprobe images of Jupiter or Saturn. It was a Banded Earth.

  Deep unease settled into his gut. "What happened to the Earth?"

  "Nothing, Malenfant," Nemoto said, her voice expressionless. "It's gone. Or rather, we have. The Red Moon has moved on a fresh universe, another of the vast ensemble of possibilities –"

  "And it has taken us with it," McCann said bitterly. "We have suffered another knight's move between possibilities. Now do you see why I weep? It is unmanly, perhaps – but now that the Red Moon has moved on from your world, any chance of rescue by your people is gone with it." He laughed, an ugly sound. "I have seen a whole succession of worlds skip through that dismal sky, Malenfant, each of them as bleak as the last – save only for yours, where I could see the glint of cities on the night side. And then your squat glider came floating down from the sky, and I allowed myself to hope, you see – a fool's mistake. But now hope is gone, and you are as stranded as I am – both of you – all of us in this Purgatory..."

  Malenfant saw it in that instant; it was as if the world swiveled around him, taking on new, and unwelcome, configurations. The Red Moon had moved on. He was indeed stranded, beyond the reach of any help from those who knew him – stranded in another universe, to which he had somehow been transported.

  In a corner of his mind he wondered if poor impoverished Luna had been restored to the skies of Earth.

  As the light show faded the Hams – the "new shift" – were moving slowly around the stockade, picking up brooms and tools, heading for the huts. Beginning their work.

  Malenfant said, "Why do they come here?"

  McCann held up his hands, plucked at his threadbare jacket. "Look at me. I am old and fat and tired – and at that I am perhaps the best functioning of those who survived the crash of the Redoubtable. And now look at the bar-bars." He faced Malenfant. "You think I am some slave-keeper. How could I keep these people, if they did not wish to stay? Or – if I keep slaves, where are the children? Where are the old, the lame?" He pointed beyond the gate. "There is a troupe of them out there. We keep up a certain trade, I suppose you'd call it. They sustain this little township with their labor, as you have seen. And in return, there are thin
gs we have which they covet: certain foodstuffs – and beer, Malenfant, your bar-bar gentleman likes his beer!"

  Nemoto said levelly to Julia, "Why do you keep these English alive?"

  Julia grinned, showing a row of tombstone teeth. "Tired ol' men," she said.

  McCann eyed Malenfant ruefully. "Pity, you see; the pity of animals. They saw we had no women or children, that we were slowly dying. They regard us as pets, these Hams. That is what we are reduced to."

  "And all your talk of educating them in a Christian, umm, Johannen life –"

  "A man does not welcome too much reality..."

  That gate was still open. You're wasting time, Malenfant.

  He found Julia. She was dressed in her native skins; no trace of her guise as a maid for the English remained. He pointed towards the open gate. He said, "Emma."

  She nodded.

  He went back to the others. "I'm out of here, McCann. Will you try to stop me?"

  McCann laughed. "What difference does it make now? But what will you do?"

  "What I came to do," Malenfant said bluntly.

  "Ah – Emma. I wish I had the comfort of such a goal." McCann looked at Nemoto. "And you, Madam Nemoto? Will you stay with a beaten old man?"

  Nemoto raised her face to the sky; flickering light reflected from her skin. "I will seek answers."

  "Answers?" McCann snorted. "Of what use are answers? Can you eat answers, sleep under them, use them to ward off the Runners, the Elves?"

  She shrugged. "I am not content to subsist, like you, like these Hams."

  Malenfant felt reluctant to lose her, even though she had betrayed him. And besides, she was scarcely street-wise: he imagined her dreaming of sheaves of parallel universes as a shaped cobble stove in her skull... "Come with me."

  She appraised him coolly. "We have always had different agendas, Malenfant."